Soft Enforcement of EU Migration Law

Introduction

This project will establish soft enforcement of EU migration law as a new research field in which legal and political science scholars will be equally active. Migration is a salient issue for the EU, and we are witnessing deep shifts in the implementation and enforcement landscapes of EU migration law. Traditional enforcement methods, such as Court of Justice proceedings initiated by the European Commission against Member States, have met their limit.

Soft Enforcement as an Alternative

Soft enforcement is becoming a flexible and politically palatable alternative. For example, Fundamental Rights Offices have been established within EU migration agencies that operationalize novel Ombuds-type administrative accountability processes. Additionally, a peer review mechanism, run jointly by the Commission and Member States, has been integrated with the Schengen area of free movement.

Project Objectives

SoftEn conceptualizes soft enforcement and unlocks the black box of its operationalization in the context of migration. It brings together theoretical insights from legal and political science on governance, enforcement, and accountability, combining legal analysis with empirical qualitative methods. Its groundbreaking nature lies in three characteristics:

1. The project will generate a new interdisciplinary, legally grounded, and empirically informed theory of soft enforcement in the migration context.
2. It will generate datasets on soft enforcement along three axes:
   • Steering policy implementation
   • Supervising policy implementation
   • Ensuring actor accountability across the EU’s migration policies. Moving beyond ‘law on the books’, it will also generate unique qualitative empirical insights at EU and selected national levels.
3. It will generate a new evidence-informed governance framework for soft enforcement that can impact the work of public institutions at EU and national levels, and ultimately, individuals.